"But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

Prayer and Faith

You can almost see the tears in Jesus’ eyes and hear the lament in his voice as he reaches out past his audience in the gospel to speak to us. He has come to earth to bring us salvation, but will we in the end accept it? Will we have the heart to persevere to attain heavenly things in the face of trials here on earth? Will we turn our lives over to God by making that life one of prayer? Or will we demur accepting only the facts of life as we see them? These are questions of the heart; these are questions of faith, our personal faith. Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her simple path connects prayer and faith in the following way:

The fruit of silence is prayer;
The fruit of prayer is faith;
The fruit of faith is love;
The fruit of love is service;
The fruit of service is peace.

Did you notice that prayer generates faith; not the other way around as we would presume? To emphasize this she tells us further: “Even if you don’t believe in God, you can pray by doing works of love, and the fruit of these works are the extra graces that come into your soul. Then you’ll begin to slowly open up and want the joy of loving God.” The ingredients of a faithful life are thus: prayer, works of love, grace from God, and faith as the joy of loving God. With the help of now Blessed John Henry Newman, and for the good of our souls, I’d like to explore a little further this relationship between prayer and faith which include the ingredients Mother Teresa gives us.

Prayer is an act of communication - the activity that nurtures the love relationship between me and God. Faith is an act of the intellect - it is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. (Heb 11:1) To see that prayer sets up the faith that we have, we consider prayer as communication that leads us to know the heart of the other. It is not a communication that just sets forth demands or a list of petitions, but one that is heart speaking to heart. It is the kind of communication we experience in a healthy marriage. It is an opening up to one another come what may: an opening up that builds trust in our relationship which is the key component of faith. I give a simple example from Joan’s and my marriage:

We were very early in our marriage and we were in the midst of a pretty heated argument when Joan stormed out of the room. I heard a door slam. That got to me and we had to talk. So we got together and I explained. When I was little and my parents got into a fight, my mother would end it by slamming doors or cabinets and withdrawing. That turned the atmosphere in our house to one of tension and fear. I felt like I was in deep trouble and there was nothing I could do about it. It gave rise to the worst feelings in my life. As Joan listened to me, she took it to heart and never again slammed a door. God bless her, she heard my heart.

And that is the way it goes for us in prayer to God; He hears our heart. This prayer/communication process also lets us get to know ourselves better - in speaking to our spouse, or in speaking speak to our God we gain personal insight. In our speaking, conscious that we are being listened to, that we are being heard, we find out how to come into harmony with another person. And that’s the way it is with communication of the heart; it goes way beyond communication of the mind.

To actually come into harmony with a loved one takes faith. Just as prayer has components on the intellect and the heart, so does faith. We speak of faith as being some kind of knowledge, a kind of certainty; and as such we tend to emphasize the intellect and intellectual processes. Thus we assume and sometimes demand that faith meet the criteria of reason. And so we may fall into the trap of rationalism - in the realm of faith, rationalism demands that God provide stringent proofs for revelation as a condition for our acceptance of it. In other words rationalism demands that God make our minds understand Him. By definition this is absurd - to think that a finite mind can grasp the infinite. Yet this attitude is the source of much of the contention between faith and reason where reason is identified as the only rational way to live. It is epitomized by the philosopher John Locke who says: the lover of truth will not entertain any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built on will warrant.” But John Henry Newman counters: “Life is for (purposeful) action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action; to act you must assume and that assumption is faith.” This is another way of saying what Mother Teresa tells us about the connection between prayer and acts of love even for an unbeliever.

Faith as knowledge involves more than our powers and structures of reason; it is knowledge that involves the whole person. The whole person is commonly reached not through reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impression, by the testimony of facts and events, by history, by description. When we go to the Saints, we find a similar list of ingredients for when we pray - prayer also involves the whole person. John Henry Newman summarizes this by saying that man is not a reasoning animal !!!; man is a seeing, feeling, contemplating, acting animal. That is why man is a person of faith rather than just a person of reason. John Paul II says: It is faith which stirs reason to move beyond all isolation and willingly run risks so that it may attain whatever is beautiful, good and true. Faith becomes the convinced and convincing advocate of reason.

But because we are persons of a fallen nature, a person of Original Sin, we need help in order to come to faith. John Henry Newman says: The journey to faith requires dispositions exceeding what our fallen nature can achieve by its own powers. Love of the Great Object of Faith, watchful attention to Him, readiness to believe Him near, easiness to believe Him intervening in human affairs, fear of the risk of slighting or missing what may really come from Him; these are feelings not natural to fallen man and they come only by supernatural grace. As Jesus tells us in the gospels and the Church continues to tell us in the Sacraments, God provides this grace in many ways to each one of us. We need only respond to receive it, we need to accept - this is the gift component of faith.

We call upon Mother Teresa now to pray with us the prayer from the Missionaries of Charity as a dedication of each day to the service of love:

Dear Lord, the Great Healer, I kneel before you, since every perfect gift must come from you. I pray, give skill to my hands, clear vision to my mind, kindness and meekness to my heart. Give me singleness of purpose, strength to lift up a part of the burden of my suffering fellow men., and a true realization of the privilege that is mine. Take from my heart all guile and worldliness, that with the simple faith of a child, I may rely on you.

Heeding this prayer, all our actions during the day will themselves be a prayer to our God. Thus when Jesus comes, he will indeed find faith on earth.